121: Exploring the Relationship between Fish Hacks, Porgy, and Black Maritime Culture with Dr. Jayson M. Porter

Anytime I get to talk about water and seafood on this show feels like a really special week for me, as I have spent most of my life thinking about how we connect with or form relationships around water. My guest, Dr. Jayson M. Porter, this week takes a really nuanced approach to this through a recent article he wrote called Fish Hacks for Distillations, which is a magazine and podcast that covers science’s historical impact on culture and society. In his article, he looks at a fish called porgy, which has often been dismissed as a “trash fish” but holds an important anchor in Black maritime culture in America.

 Jayson is an environmental writer and historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, and the Institute at Brown of Environment and Society. His research specializes in environmental politics, science and technology studies, foods ystems, and racial ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. He is also an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Outside of academia, he loves to connect with other black environmental educators, write creative non-fiction stories, and design environmental-literacy curricula for broader audiences of all ages. 

In today’s episode, he shares some of the stories and lenses he brought to writing this article, how he wove his family’s personal histories through his Poppy’s fish hacking with the broader ecology of ocean landscapes, Black-operated fisheries, and explores the nuances (and limits) of scientific and historic knowledges that can shape the questions we ask about our individual and collective pasts.

Learn More About Jayson:

120: Making Sense of Misunderstood Vegetables through Humour and Celebration with Becky Selengut

Often when we make our grocery runs, time and money are on our mind – which can quickly lead to following a stringent list of household classics and crowd pleasers. But sometimes, in the corner of your eye, you might catch a new to you vegetable and wonder what the heck it is, or how it works. My guest today, Becky Selengut, is here to provide knowledge and humour in getting to know these misunderstood vegetables more.

Becky is a chef, author, instructor, and podcaster based in Seattle, and her latest cookbook is Misunderstood Vegetables: How to Fall in Love with Sunchokes, Rutabaga, Eggplant, and More out everywhere today. Her earlier books include How to Taste, Shroom, Good Fish, and Not One Shrine. When she’s not the chef aboard the M/V Thea Foss, Becky is also the cohost of the local foods podcast Field to Fork, forages for wild foods, makes a mean Manhattan, and shares her life with her sommelier wife April Pogue and their loony pointer mix Izzy and vocally gifted cat Jinx.

 Becky is on the show today to explore the story behind her new cookbook, discussing what makes a vegetable misunderstood, how she works with learners and readers to make food and cooking more approachable and fun, the ways that foraging and misunderstood vegetables can connect us back to land and nature, and why it’s important to think about seasonality when writing a cookbook. While Becky’s humorous and playful approach makes these elusive vegetables less daunting, she also shares some underlying messages about how food and our own understandings of belonging are intertwined too.

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119: De-stigmatizing Harm Reduction, Mental Health, and Drug Use in Alberta with Danielle English

We’ve spoken a bit this season about the drug poisoning crisis and how breweries can work to support their neighbours using substances, but with this affecting so many across Canada, I wanted to come back to this topic with some more dimensions. My guest this week is Danielle English, who’s on to share more about harm reduction strategies and unpack the misconceptions and stigma that surround drug use and poverty. 

Danielle is a harm reduction and mental health advocate who comes from a background of lived and living experience. She does grass roots activism and lobbies for policy changes that will support people who use drugs. Danielle advocates for safe drug supplies and safe spaces for people who use drugs, and uses her own experiences navigating the mental health system to demonstrate the issues with the province of Alberta’s current resources. 

In today’s conversation, Danielle explores the power, structures, and policies that are upholding harmful misconceptions about adequate and appropriate care for those who use drugs. Danielle provides resources, strategies, and lived experience knowledge to demonstrate how these are affecting many people throughout our communities, and how we can seek out resources and strategies to provide harm reduction to our own communities.

I will give a topic warning for this episode, as we discuss drug use, sexual abuse, and traumatic experiences that shape mental health. This interview is an incredibly important one for me, in how she speaks truth to so much fear and stigma around why people use drugs, and I encourage you to listen to her story.

Resources from Danielle: 

118: Pink Gold - Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico with Dr. María L. Cruz-Torres

The idea of fish industry tends to feel big, vague, and hyper-masculine – it’s easy to think of tales of fisherman and ideals of masculinity. But as my guest this week shares, there are so many complexities to how gender, fishing, and identities intersect. 

My guest this week is Dr. María L. Cruz-Torres. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Transborder Studies at Arizona State University and a cultural anthropologist whose areas of teaching and research include: political ecology; impact of globalization upon local communities and households; gender and work; sustainability and the environment; migration; food systems; and the environmental and social aspects of natural resource management. Her research has always combined a mixed methods approach of qualitative ethnography, ecological analysis, archival research, and household surveys.

She speaks today about the “shrimp ladies” in southern Sinaloa, Mexico, who are locally known as changueras. Through her new book Pink Gold: Women, Shrimp, and Work in Mexico, María describes how women shrimp vendors sell seafood in open-air markets that form an extralegal but key part of the local economy built around this “pink gold.” She shares the stories of how the women struggled and evolved from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, and how their roles in Sinaloa and Mazatlan offer fresh insights into gender and labour, street economies, and commodities as culturally valuable experiences.

Learn More About María: 

117: Unpacking Anti-Fatness in Health and Nutrition for Body Liberation with Patrilie Hernandez of Embody Lib

Health, nutrition, and food are spaces that can be fraught with harmful and perpetual misconceptions of the body, to the point where many people of the global majority may not always feel safe or heard. My guest this week, Patrilie Hernandez, is someone who works to create more weight-inclusive and nutritionally holistic practices at the forefront of these spaces.

Patrilie (they/she) has over 14 years of professional experience working in the health and nutrition sector as an educator, advocate, project manager, and policy analyst. They combine their academic background in culinary arts, anthropology, nutrition and health with lived experience a sa large-bodied, neuroatypical, queer, multiracial femme of the Puerto Rican diaspore to disrupt the status quo of the local nutrition and wellness community, where they advocate for a weight-inclusive paradigm centring on the social determinants of health. Patrilile is the founder of Embody Lib and partners with nutrition, medical, health, and wellness providers to integrate weight-inclusive strategies that can help improve the health and wellbeing of historically marginalized communities.

In today’s conversation, we explore how her exceptional background informs her multi-dimensional approach to nutrition and food, unpack colonial and white supremacist lenses that have long-informed nutritional and food spheres while still looking at the value of science and health, and how their Embody Lib work platform helps people of the global majority reclaim their health and wellbeing.

Learn More About Patrilie!

 

116: How Ozempic and Stomach Paralysis Impact Relationships with Food with Emily Wright

Across social media and TV advertisements, drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy have risen in recent years and are quickly associated with weight loss and celebrity lifestyles. Yet semaglutide drugs (which includes Ozempic and Wegovy) are intended originally as a drug for use by adults with type 2 diabetes, to manage blood sugar levels along with diet and exercise. With the shifts towards weight loss, Ozempic has become a powerful representation of our relationships with food, and the stories of how its used and experienced by type 2 diabetics are not always at the forefront.

My guest today, Emily Wright, is here to share her personal experiences with Ozempic and the challenges she faced with severe complications from it, including gastroparesis. Emily Wright is a powerful educator, advocate, and public speaker. She is a member of two speaker’s bureaus and a regular guest lecturer at University of Toronto, Ryerson University, George Brown College, and elementary and secondary schools across the GTA. With a special ability to speak to people of all age levels, Emily uses her personal voice and story to confront stigma and create awareness across a spectrum of important social issues, including mental health and addition, homelessness, and bullying. Emily Wright has a Master’s degree in Teaching from the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education. She currently works as a curriculum consultant, speaker, and teacher for a Toronto, Ontario School Board.

Emily today uses her personal story to speak to the nuances of using Ozempic, managing type 2 diabetes, and how relationships with food and body can be profoundly impacted by Ozempic.

Learn More About Emily: